


With a candle to guide me

by paintedwolf



Series: Sub Rosa [3]
Category: Charmed (TV 1998)
Genre: Gen, Introspection, Taking liberties with Chris' powers probably, not a big one but it's there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:14:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23139832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paintedwolf/pseuds/paintedwolf
Summary: Tag to “Little Monsters”Chris Halliwell is contemplating the nature of paranoia.
Series: Sub Rosa [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1638253
Comments: 2
Kudos: 34





	With a candle to guide me

**Author's Note:**

> Haha so while tidying up my increasingly disorganized writing folder, I found another one of these buried in a doc that I completely forgot about, so here is *Thor voice* another! 
> 
> For anybody who's been reading these, I have reordered the series to keep them in chronological order with season 6, so if there's any confusion, I'm sorry!
> 
> Title comes from "Monster" by Imagine Dragons

Chris Halliwell is contemplating the nature of paranoia. 

Or at least, he’s trying to figure out when he’d started seeing threats and danger everywhere he looks. Given the situation, he's probably more than a little entitled to it. And yet. 

In the future, he’d been told more than once that he was paranoid – _neurotic_ even (which, thinking about it, isn’t all that different from his current charges _twenty years in the past_ ) – but Chris has always seen it more as being necessarily cautious. His _neurosis_ – or whatever they liked to call it – has certainly saved his ass more than once.

Then he told The Charmed Ones to vanquish a baby. A _demonic_ baby, all things considered, who had been sharing Wyatt’s playpen, but a baby all the same. 

He might have seen more death and destruction and violence than a person his age probably has any right to, but even _he_ had had to squash a small part of himself that cried out and shrunk away from demanding the death of a child.

He was _Wyatt’s_ age, for God’s sake. Chris walks around every day knowing _exactly_ what his now-innocent, angelic-looking little big brother who’d called him ‘Kiss’ last week will become if he doesn’t succeed in changing the future.

Wyatt was supposed to have been one of the greatest forces of good in the world, and yet, despite being raised by an equally powerful, good, and loving family, he had still become his own version of the Source as an adult. Chris knows intimately the ways in which the world can shape and mould and break a person. His own fiancé had been a cold-hearted assassin, once. 

And yet, there he’d been, condemning an innocent child for what he was without a second thought. 

He’s aware that he has a gaping blind spot where Wyatt’s safety – and future morality – is concerned, and yeah, pretty much the entire future is hanging in the balance, but mostly, Chris just feels like a goddamn hypocrite.

Looking back, the whole thing actually makes him feel a little nauseated. 

And that’s possibly not the best way to be feeling when he’s perched – in a manner most normal people would describe as precarious – on one of the high suspender cables of Golden Gate Bridge. 

He closes his eyes and lets the sound of the wind that’s rushing through his hair and catching in his clothes fill his mind. It isn’t precisely meditation – not the kind Leo used to wax about sometimes when he actually saw fit to pop on down from his roost in the clouds – but it helps him refocus and get his skittish thoughts in order.

He’s been having to do that a lot, lately. 

Chris has always trusted his own conviction. He never makes big decisions lightly, or without careful thought and planning, because he’s _always_ thinking and planning.

It’s part of the reason why he and the others had managed to hold out against Wyatt and the brute force of his demonic armies for so long. His brother isn’t stupid, but Chris has been running three steps ahead of Wyatt since before he hit puberty. 

The downside is, when his mind is always working, it casts itself out on all kinds of winding paths and trajectories, ones that leave cracks and dingy alleys into which doubt could lurk and creep and crush him if he isn’t careful. 

He never second-guesses himself once he’s made a choice, because if he does, he won’t ever be able to take action, won’t ever be able to claw his way out of the endless spiral of self-doubt and apprehension that he had been caught in so much as a child. 

He isn’t that hesitant, unsure kid anymore, even if Chris knows he still exists somewhere deep-down where he’s never truly been able to let go of being not good enough or powerful enough or strong enough.

He’d had to cast aside those insecurities when Wyatt took over, or he’d never have survived. Bianca told him sometimes that it made him unyielding, but if being insufferably stubborn gets him and the people he’s sworn to protect through another day, well, it isn’t like Chris thinks he’s going to win any popularity contests. He’s already come out second-best once in his life.

And that leads him all the way back to why he’s up here in the first place. He had been so sure and insistent that vanquishing the manticore would be the best thing. In a way, he still is. 

But at the same time, can he really believe that the manticore baby’s nature as a demon will win out no matter what when Wyatt’s supposed inherent goodness hadn’t been enough to overcome whatever it was that turned him? 

It had been a knee-jerk, almost irrational reaction when he’d seen that baby playing with Wyatt like it was the most natural thing in the world. He’d wanted it gone, away from his brother, hadn’t particularly cared what it was or why it was there. 

He’d gone to Leo, knowing he would agree, knowing he’d be more likely to convince the sisters than he was. It hadn’t been playing dirty as much as Chris had just wanted someone on his side, even if, as a rule, going to Leo for anything is more last resort than viable option. 

Or, that’s what Chris tells himself, anyway.

What he can’t quite fathom is whether his actions had been driven by a real and true belief that the baby was a threat, or if he had simply reacted to the possibility he _could_ be a threat.

There’s something settling within him – right in the pit of his stomach – like ash and dark smoke that’s stealing away his air. It’s that same illogical fear he’d felt when he’d first laid eyes on that manticore; that sends cold shivers down his spine every time they call him; whenever he senses something even slightly not right in his periphery. 

He _is_ paranoid, almost incomprehensibly so, and far beyond what can be called reasonable, even for a Halliwell. 

And he’s losing control.

If he’s not careful, it could compromise his judgement and decision-making, or worst case, cause him to do something _really_ stupid.

But it’s crawling around in his gut, sliding up his throat like a scream that he’s trying and failing to hold down. 

He can’t lose control, he _can’t._

He’s already lost so much; he _cannot_ afford to lose his damn mind too.

He takes a few deep breaths and casts his focus outward instead. 

It doesn’t take long to find them. Their auras are strong, as always, woven in magic and light and goodness. They’re all home, maybe taking time for a rare, quiet night in. He can’t tell what they’re doing, if they’re sitting around the table for dinner and laughing at some joke that Paige has made, or curled up together on the couch watching one of those sappy movies that Phoebe loves, but he can sense enough to know they’re content. 

Intermingled with them is his brother’s aura, golden and warm and splashed here and there with red, the way it used to be when it was more familiar to him than anything else in the world. 

In the future, the last time Chris had cared to check, it had been swarming and black and smeared in angry crimson. His stomach twists at the thought of the final confirmation he’d needed to know his brother was gone, one night when he’d lain awake just before he’d left the future. 

Then, the dark mass that had become Wyatt’s essence became his last push of resolve that sent him back to the past, even if, for just that moment, his only reason was that he never, ever wanted to feel anything like that again.

Now...he isn’t entirely sure _what_ he feels other than a deep need to protect that aura, and the person it belongs to, with everything he has.

And protect him he will. He’ll protect _all_ of them, because he _isn’t_ that scared, weak fourteen-year-old kid anymore, and he’ll be damned if he lets whatever evil son-of-a-bitch he’s looking for take them away again, even if things are that much harder, and the world is never as black-and-white simple as he sometimes wishes it was.

He calms down bit by bit as he lets himself get lost in the feel of them. He doesn't do it often, because it's almost addicting after being without them for so long, but that night, he needs it. He needs to believe in good again, the way they do. The way he once did before that belief had been tested in every possible way. 

He needs to be reminded that for all the shit there is now and in the future, it's not all bad, even if it feels like there's no escaping it and everything's destined to go to hell no matter what he does. 

More than anything else, Chris needs _hope_. 

**Author's Note:**

> So I have discovered in the process of reading and posting these that I apparently write season 6 Chris as perpetually 10 seconds from losing it, but I figure with the amount of stress he's probably under, it's a miracle he didn't lose it sooner than when he punched out Leo in "Spin City".


End file.
